hezekiah jones

I enjoyed the brief discussion of "specified complexity" by the regulars. But does Ed know what it is? It's a fancy little expression, and Ed maintains it was "recently discovered." (Maybe Ed means it was "recently coined"?)

I'd still like to see Ed explain what it is. Simply inserting it into a proposition might make one sound clever, but it doesn't seem to really mean anything without examples; and especially without contrasting examples of "unspecified complexity."

theyeti

Did you read my earlier post, or the one I linked to on the other thread? This is true sometimes, and not true other times. For the most part, we know where and how "junk" DNA arises. Regardless, it's the shared patterns, including silencing mutations, that provide strong evidence for common descent; it can't be explained by either chance or functional necessity.

theyeti

Ed

It may have had all the "paraphernalia" in the distant past and provided some benefit in an ancient environment.


[b] [quote]
Ed: and the repetitions may also have a function that we have not yet been discovered.

OC: In humans, there is a group of non-coding DNA chunks called Alu sequences that are repeated over a million times, and this one family alone accounts for about 5% of our DNA. In the well-studied fruitfly Drosophila, there are three pieces of so-called ‘satellite DNA’, just seven (IIRC) ‘letters’ long. They do not spell out any amino acid. And they are repeated eleven million, 3.6 million and 3.6 million times. They make up 40% of the fly’s genome. Care to hazard just what sort of function these have except to make the genome bigger? Maybe creationism can help us here, since geneticists are at a loss to find a function for them. You do realise that using more materials than are necessary is not good design, don’t you?[b][quote]

As I stated above they may have had a function in the past and that now we cannot identify.

Quote:

Ed: Or they may be the result of mutations, the scriptures dont say that humans are immune to mutations. OC: Both correct. Mutations -- copying errors -- such as duplications can account for junk DNA. That’s part of evolution. And scriptures don’t mention mutations at all... and so are useless as a source of genetics information. Since humans aren't immune to mutations, perhaps you'd care to explain why we share several such mutations in otherwise identical non-functional DNA with the other great apes? Remember that the patterns in DNA are copied down generations, even into separated lineages.

Since our body plans are similar to apes of course our blueprint, ie DNA, would be similar. Therefore if both apes and man encounter the same mutagenic sources then similar areas of DNA would be impacted by them.

[b] Apparently both apes and man encountered similar mutagenic agents that damaged the same gene as I stated above.

Ed

How does the fossilization process "catch and see"? According to some on this board NOTHING can escape the all powerful fossilization process!


[b] Flowering plants may have been much less common in the distant past than they are today.

RufusAtticus

Yes, so rare that the didn't actually exist yet.

-RvFvS

lpetrich

Which means that an enormous amount of genetic evolution must have happened along the way.

But they would have to last until it's time for a big flood. In any case, there is not a trace of their existence in present-day rocks.

Pure evasion. Ed, your comments might be interpreted as conceding that Flood-Geology criticisms are unanswerable.

By their supposedly not claiming to have created the Universe from nothing? The Biblical God doesn't claim that either, so it's back to square one for you, Ed.

The Bible doesn't say that, but it strongly implies that if free will leads to sin, then it is best to get rid of it. Read Mt. 5:29-30, Mt. 18:8-9, Mk. 9:43-47 -- Jesus Christ states that parts of the body that lead one astray ought to be removed. Also, in Mt. 19:12, he states that one ought to be willing to consider neutering oneself, which is an application of that principle.

Ed, this may win you a Nobel Prize: find thos past functions, and convince the scientific community of that, and there could be a trip for Stockholm waiting for you. Do you want to be rich and famous? Here's your chance.

There is, however, a poor correlation between outward similarity and genetic distance. The human-chimpanzee distance is about the same as that between some outwardly nearly identical strains of fruit flies, as Francesco Ayala and his colleagues have found. And one paper in Science in the mid-1980's compared human and chimpanzee skeletons using some measurements often used to compare frog skeletons; the h-c relative differences were higher than the highest known frog ones -- even though frogs had emerged and started to diversify in the Mesozoic!

And it gets even worse. For a long time, the family tree of bacteria was little better than hand-waving, with classification being mainly done for the sake of identification. But along came Carl Woese and his sequencing of ribosomal RNA -- and while some traditional classifications turned out to be natural groups, many did not. Which indicates that bacteria have a poor correlation between outward appearance and relatedness.

In the same place??? Ed, I suggest that you think about your statements before posting them.

I was referring to living ones. And who made the claim that you are referring to?

Oolon Colluphid

But the similarities are also in the unused regions of DNA, the areas that are not used in making bodies. Why would that be?

As for your 'it may have been different in the past' (flowering plants, junk DNA etc): all the evidence suggests not. How might you go about providing evidence for your position? How is it at all refutable? How can we tell, in other words, that it isn't total bollocks?

Oolon

Ed

[quote]Originally posted by Jack the Bodiless:
<strong>
Ed: Also look at the coelacanth, no fossils for 65 million years and yet it was living all that time. If one had been found say 50,000 years old would it have been considered "out of place"?

Jack: No, it would not. Darwin himself predicted "living fossils" like the coelacanth, surviving in isolated stable habitats.
But there is no genuine fossil of a creature which appears too early in the fossil record. Like a coelacanth in the Precambrian, or a hominid in the Jurassic. It is statistically impossible for this to be a coincidence.[/b][quote]

If most of the fossil record is the result of flood then the number of animals that were killed at elevations that are "out of place" would be very small and unlikely to have become fossilized. However, not all Christian geologists agree that the entire fossil record is the result of the flood and in fact the flood may not have left much of a trace at all according to some.

Quote:

Jack: ...Which is why some creationists (those who are aware of the significance of this) feel the need to invent such fossils

See above my examples of possible out of place fossils. While there have been some of cases of misidentification of fossils, I dont know of any cases where creation scientists have invented fossils.

Quote:

Ed: The chance of finding single fossil grains is astronomical. jack: Nope, the chances of NOT finding single fossil grains is astronomical. Pollen gets everywhere, and rocks are rich in pollen grains. But not a single grain of grass pollen got into those older rocks.

It could be because pollen bearing plants were very rare in ancient times.

[b] No, because if his son had not been born then Lee would not have been my ancestor.

Ed

Thanks Automaton, you have helped make my point.
I never said that there are no positive mutations but that they always result in either a loss of information or a maintenance of information. And in fact this study seems to point in that direction. The organism's variation eventually reaches a saturation point. Two of the possible explanations, i and ii, for this saturation point to the possible loss of information. This is discussed in the last paragraph of your article:

Genes Run out of Positive Mutations. The apparent saturation phenomenon in molecular evolution would be explained by four possibilities: (i) The effect of positive mutations is counteracted by the gradual accumulation of negative mutations; (ii) the rate of the accumulation of positive mutations decreases as evolution proceeds, that is, the gene runs out of positive mutations; (iii) the contribution of each newly introduced positive mutation to the total effect decreases as mutations accumulate; (iv) some biological factor sets an upper limit to the activity regardless of the evolutionary capacity of the gene itself. In the fourth case, evolved genes should still have various combinations of positive mutations (have not yet been converged) when the activity approaches a saturation.

theyeti

How are you defining information here? According to most defintions of information, like Shannon information, nearly every mutation will result in an increase. This is because you've added to the number of polymorphisms within a population, and thus you have more variation, and thus the population requires more information to represent.

Besides, if you read the article, you would see that mutations result in taking an unrealted piece of DNA and making it functional for ampicilin resistance. So it is an increase in functional ability, which would fit most people's intuitive sense of information.

Unless you take into account....mmmm...selection. The authors don't explore this in detail so I'm not sure what their point is here. But they mention that (ii) is the one that conforms best to the data.

This is probably true. Genes will sooner or later reach a peak on an adaptive fitness landscape. This is what we expect from Darwinian evolution, and it's one reason why well adapted genes rarely have "beneficial" mutations. How does this support your case?

Whether or not the increased benefits of the gene/protein get smaller as it reaches an adaptive peak depends on the shape of the fitness landscape. I don't know of any reason why it must form a smooth hump instead of a sharp peak. Regardless, it's hard to see how this helps your case.

There is actually a theoretical maximum to the catalytic ability of enzymes (I think it's the kcat/kmol value at some number^-8, but I can't remember). This is reached when every single collision with the substrate results in a reaction. There are only a tiny handful of enzymes that are known to approach this limit, and they tend to be, unsurprisingly, highly conserved; the rest are presumably stuck in local optima. There is nothing about this that is inconsistent with evolution -- indeed, evolution predicts that things will get stuck in local optima, whereas "design" could or should always result in global optima. Again, this does not help your case.

theyeti